How to build a company
Every job inside a company, what the person who does it looks like, what it costs, which ones you have to do yourself this year — and which of them can be the same person. 64 roles across 7 departments, informed by how funded companies actually staff up — plus the field roles a trade business lives on and the specialist seats a regulator creates.
You need to wear many hats to create a company, as a startup, land funding and become a future unicorn business.
Nobody hands a founder an org chart. The jobs exist from day one whether or not anyone is paid to do them — the books still have to balance, someone still has to answer the customer, and the payroll still has to be remitted on time. This page lists those jobs so you can decide, deliberately, which hats you keep, which you buy by the day, and which you hire.
…and 13 more seats for when a regulator, a catalogue, a breach or a board creates one.
The eight hats every company wears
These exist whether or not anyone is paid to hold them whether or not it has anyone in the chair. The fractional version buys the judgment by the day rather than by the year — which is the whole argument for it before Series A.
Owns the direction, the money in the bank and the hiring bar. In a startup, also owns whatever nobody else owns yet.
Turns the plan into a working machine: delivery, hiring, the operating rhythm, and the unglamorous follow-through the founder keeps running out of time for.
Owns cash, the model, the raise mechanics and the audit. The person who knows exactly how many weeks of runway are left.
Owns what gets built, what it is built on, and whether the team can keep shipping in a year.
Owns the software the company runs on — what you buy, how it is connected, who can get into it, and what happens when it goes down.
Owns positioning, demand and the words the market repeats back to you — including the ones investors use in a partner meeting.
Owns the motion: how the product reaches a buyer, who it reaches them through, and what it costs to repeat. Partnering and growth, not messaging.
Owns hiring, employment compliance, compensation and the thing people mean when they talk about culture: who gets promoted and who gets let go.
The rest of the org chart, department by department
Everything below the hats. Each role is one page: who to hire, what education and experience actually matter, whether domain experience is required, the credentials that exist and who issues them, what the job is at pre-seed versus Series A, and what it can be merged with.
Product & design
2 rolesDeciding what gets built and what it feels like to use. A startup's first product manager is usually the founder; the first designer rarely is.
Headed by Fractional CTO — above, with the other hats.
Decides what gets built next and says no to the rest. Accountable for the outcome of the thing shipped, not for shipping it.
Owns how the product looks, behaves and holds together — and, in the systems version of the job, the components everyone else…
Technology
19 rolesBuilding and running the thing. The hardest hires to judge if you are not technical, and the most expensive to get wrong.
Headed by Fractional CTO and Fractional CIO — above, with the other hats.
Software — building the product
10 rolesThe people who write and ship what the company sells. In an agency they are the billable hours; in a product company they are the asset.
Builds and runs the product. At senior and staff level, also decides how it is built and raises everyone else's output.
Owns the part the customer touches — and, at architect level, the structure that keeps a large interface maintainable.
Builds what the customer never sees: the data model, the APIs, the jobs that run at 3am, and the part that has to still be…
Builds and ships the iOS and Android apps — including the parts nobody warns you about: store review, device fragmentation, and…
Finds what the people who built it cannot see — and builds the harness that keeps finding it after they have moved on.
Owns the team rather than the code: who is on it, what they are working on, whether they are getting better, and whether the work…
Decides how the pieces fit — the systems, the integrations, the boundaries — and writes it down so a team can build to it.
Moves data from where it is produced to where it is used, reliably and on a schedule — pipelines, warehouses and the plumbing…
Puts models into production and keeps them working — the serving, the evaluation, the monitoring, and knowing when the model is…
Owns the numbers the company trusts: the pipelines, the definitions, the warehouse and whether two dashboards can disagree.
IT — running the company
7 rolesThe people who run the computing the company itself depends on: the pipeline, the databases, the laptops, the network, the access. They may or may not sit with the software team, and often do not report the same way.
Owns how code gets from a laptop to production and what happens to it there: the pipeline, the infrastructure, the monitoring,…
Owns whether the thing stays up, measured rather than argued: service objectives, error budgets, the on-call rotation, and the…
Keeps the database fast, backed up and recoverable — and is the person who knows whether last night’s backup would actually…
Runs the company’s own computing: laptops, accounts, email, the network, the office, and whoever cannot print.
Owns the connectivity: the office network, the VPN, the firewalls, the links between sites, and the latency somebody is…
The person staff actually go to: accounts, devices, access, the thing that stopped working ten minutes before a meeting.
Does the security work rather than owning the policy: hardening, monitoring, patching, reviewing code and answering the…
Delivery — getting contracted work out of the door
2 rolesThe seats that define an agency or a contract shop and are optional in a product company: somebody owns scope, schedule and the client conversation so that engineers do not.
Gets the build delivered: the plan, the dependencies, the client or stakeholder conversation, and the week where it all slips.
Works out what the software actually has to do — the process as it is, the process as it should be, and the requirements a team…
Operations
6 rolesWhere people and delivery live. HR belongs here — hiring, onboarding, payroll, employment compliance and mobility are operational work with a legal edge — alongside turning a signed customer into a working one. The CHRO and the COO are the two hats above it.
Headed by Fractional COO and Fractional CHRO — above, with the other hats.
The human on the other end of an employment process — getting a person hired, onboarded, paid and answered, correctly and in…
Answers the customer, fixes what can be fixed in the moment, and routes the rest to whoever can.
Makes cross-functional work actually finish: the launch, the migration, the certification, the thing that needs six people who do…
Pays people correctly and on time, in the right currency, with the right deductions and the right filings behind it.
Gets a person legally able to work where the company needs them, and keeps the permissions current.
Owns the first 30 to 90 days of a customer's life: getting them live, trained and using the thing they bought.
Field & trade
6 rolesThe people who do the billable work and the people who organise them. In a trade business these are the first hires and the whole product — every other department on this page exists to keep them busy and paid.
Headed by Fractional COO — above, with the other hats.
Does the licensed work, and is the reason the job passes inspection. In a small trade business, also the de facto trainer and…
Learns the trade on your jobs while doing the work that does not need a ticket — and is the only sustainable answer to a shortage…
Decides what a job will cost and what to charge for it — the single role with the most direct line to whether the business makes…
Owns the day: who goes where, in what order, with which parts — and tells the customer the truth about when.
Runs the crew on site: the sequence, the safety, the quality and whether the job finishes in the hours it was sold for.
Owns the whole delivery engine: the crews, the schedule, the fleet, the parts, the margins per job and the callback rate.
Finance
5 rolesIts own department, reporting to its own hat. The books, the cash, the payments rails and the audit — kept deliberately separate from whoever spends the money, because that separation is the cheapest control a company has.
Headed by Fractional CFO — above, with the other hats.
Moves money out of the company across countries, currencies and banks — reliably, cheaply, and with a reconciliation trail.
Decides how a transaction is recorded and defends it — revenue recognition, equity, leases, acquisitions — and produces…
Owns the books end to end: the close, the controls, the statements, and whether the numbers the board sees are right.
Checks that what the company says happened actually happened — and, in the forensic version, works out what happened when it…
Keeps the books: the close, the reconciliations, accounts payable and receivable, and the file the auditor will ask for.
Marketing & go-to-market
5 rolesTwo halves that are often confused. The brand half does creative, positioning, campaigns and the story the company tells outward and repeats inward — the CMO's work. The go-to-market half is partnering and growth: partnerships for reach, SDRs (BDRs outside the United States) for pipeline, and account management for what you already won. Between them sits RevOps, the plumbing that makes marketing, sales and finance count the same thing the same way.
Headed by Fractional CMO and Fractional GTM — above, with the other hats.
Owns the customers you already have: adoption, renewal, expansion, and the early warning before one leaves.
Builds the routes to market you do not own: resellers, platforms, referral networks and the integrations that put you inside…
Starts conversations that did not exist yet — outbound research, first contact, qualification — and hands a real opportunity to…
The plumbing between marketing, sales and finance: one funnel, one set of definitions, one forecast everyone believes.
Runs the demand engine day to day: the site, the content, the campaigns, the launches and the numbers underneath them.
13 more seats, when something creates one
None of these is a seat a company starts with, and most are a function inside another hat long before they are a person. What creates each one is written against it — a regulator, a disclosure regime, an enterprise customer's security questionnaire, a catalogue of work that has to be commissioned. Read the trigger before the title.
Owns what the product is and what it is for — the bets, the sequence, and the things deliberately not built.
Owns what using the company feels like end to end — the journey, the interface, the brand’s touchpoints, the moments that…
Owns what gets made: the slate, the commissioning, the editorial standard, and the rights behind all of it.
Owns the data as an asset: the definitions, the governance, the quality, and who is allowed to see what.
Owns where the company uses AI, what it is allowed to touch, and who answers when it is wrong.
Owns the security of what the company holds: the controls, the evidence, the incident when it comes.
The company’s lawyer in the room where decisions get made: contracts, corporate matters, disputes, and the risks nobody else is…
Owns whether the company does what the rules require — and can prove it afterwards.
Owns the view of what could go wrong across the whole company, and what is being done about the few that would actually hurt.
Owns the company’s environmental and social footprint and, increasingly, the disclosures it is legally obliged to publish about…
Runs the executive office: the CEO’s calendar, the board pack, the correspondence, the travel, and the dozen things a week that…
Owns what the company knows: where it is written down, whether it can be found, and whether it survives the people who leave.
Owns how people get better at the job: onboarding, training, certification, and the skills the company will need next year.
The initials collide — write them out
- GTM — Head of Go-to-Market: CRO means Chief Revenue Officer here and Chief Risk Officer elsewhere on this site — two seats with nothing in common, and in a company with both, write them out. Worth knowing about this one: the revenue title is recent. It came out of Silicon Valley SaaS and took hold through the 2010s, and LinkedIn's hiring data put head of revenue operations at the top of its 2023 Jobs on the Rise list and the CRO title fourth on its 2024 UK fastest-growing list. There is no official count of how many exist. That recency explains the software: the revenue-intelligence category was built for a budget that did not exist twenty years ago, held by one executive instead of split between a sales VP and a marketing VP.
- CCO — Chief Content Officer: CCO also means Chief Compliance Officer, and the two seats have nothing in common. Write the full title in any document where both could appear.
- CISO — Chief Information Security Officer: CSO is ambiguous: it means Chief Security Officer in one company and Chief Sustainability Officer in another. CISO is unambiguous, which is why it is the title used here.
- CLO — Chief Legal Officer: CLO also means Chief Learning Officer. In any company with both, write the full title.
- CCO — Chief Compliance Officer: CCO also means Chief Content Officer. The two seats share three letters and nothing else.
- CRO — Chief Risk Officer: CRO is far more often read as Chief Revenue Officer — the go-to-market seat on this site, and a much newer title. Chief Risk Officer is the older of the two and the one that usually loses the initials. In a company with both, spell them out; in a company with only this one, expect to be misread.
- CSO — Chief Sustainability Officer: CSO is shared with Chief Security Officer. Sustainability has the better claim to the initials in common usage, which is exactly why the security seat is written as CISO.
- CAO — Chief Administrative Officer: CAO is also used for Chief Analytics Officer and Chief Accounting Officer. Administrative carries the most weight in common usage, which is a reason to spell the other two out.
- CLO — Chief Learning Officer: CLO is shared with Chief Legal Officer. In a company with both, use the full title.
The order to hire in
Not a rule — a default, and one worth arguing with. The principle underneath it: hire the hat that is costing you the most money to keep wearing badly. Nearly every founder gets finance and people help later than they should, and marketing leadership earlier.
Then: how to actually run the business
The org chart is half the problem. The other half is the operating detail of the vertical you are in — the procedures, the software the trade runs on, the licences, and where to buy.